Climate Trends in the West: Too Hot to Touch?

A Remote Access Weather Station

By Theodore Smith, Climate and Society ’13

The heated debate on climate change often brings into question how much our planet may or may not actually be warming. Are recent heat waves and wild land fires actual phenomena of anthropogenic climate change or are they nothing more than a sporadic event experienced from time to time? And just how accurate is station data utilized to make future projections?

Over the summer I’ve spent my time interning at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) located in Reno, Nevada analyzing RAWS (Remote Access Weather Station) data. These stations are located in extremely remote areas of the U.S. so that their data recordings are not subject to interferences such as the urban heat island effect, for example.

A key focus of my research involves analyzing climate trends from about 530 RAWS located in the western U.S. Utilizing Matlab coding, learned from my Quantitative Models of Climate Sensitive Natural and Human Systems class last fall, I’m in the process of creating monthly, seasonal and annual values of the highest minimum, maximum and mean temperatures at these stations from their daily recordings. After having obtained these numbers and calculating the needed values, I plot and analyze them in Matlab. From there, I then examine the specific region for climate trends.

The belief held by my supervisor, Dr. Kelly Redmond, and myself is that we will see a general warming pattern at each of these stations, in both their average maximum and minimum temperatures. To what degree these areas are experiencing warming is the question that we hope to address as our analysis continues.

While the RAWS data remains relatively unscathed by anthropogenic influences, its Achilles’ heel is a lack of historical data. RAWS are relatively new and contain only 20-30 years of historical data making it hard to analyze present day climate trends with the past. This presents a bit of a hiccup when determining if what we see on the graphs is truly a trend as we have nothing to compare it to. To address this issue we are looking to compare the RAWS data to that of another station in the neighboring area, the Cooperative Observer Network (COOP) data.

Addressing the analysis from a statistical approach we plan to calculate the covariance of these two sets of data to see if they are indeed compatible. COOP station data is displaying a general climate trend of increasing temperatures in both its seasonal and annual values and so the question remains – is our unhindered remote data showing us the same?